Page 2 of Carry on Wayward Son

How? The word beat through me and drew blood on every pass. How did I not know? How did I sit in a lecture hall four hundred miles away and believe the lies? How did I read her name on a Christmas card in my mother’s hand and never once demand to hear her voice?

Then Willa’s eyes found mine.

Something lit behind them, fever-bright, hope so fierce it hurt to look at. “Jace!”

She came out of that chair before the orderly could stop her, rocketed across the space between us, and threw both arms around me. She held on with a strength that had no right to live in a body that thin. Fierce. Fiercer. Her fingers dug into my back like she’d fall off the edge of the world if she let go. I wrapped her up, feeling every rib, and swore an oath I didn’t say out loud.

One bag had fallen to the floor when she’d launched herself. One. Small enough to carry in a single hand. Two years of a life, and they’d let her pack it into something I could’ve fit under an airplane seat.

I had to force a swallow past the knot in my throat.

She picked up the bag.

“We’ll see you next week.” I settled my arm around her shoulders and gave the director my father’s easy smile, the one that closed deals. “Soon as the birthday’s behind us. Thank you for taking such good care of her.”

I squeezed Willa’s shoulder twice. Pressed my thumb once, hard, against her arm. Old code, the kind we’d built as kids sitting through our parents’ dinners, and I watched her understand it. Watched her school the hope off her face and give the room a wan nod. My sister, who’d figured out inside two seconds that I was lying through my teeth and matched me beat for beat. Because I wasn’t the only one who’d learned the lessons of being a Hollingsworth.

I walked her out through the whisper of lilies and lemon polish and into the daylight

I didn’t breathe right until I got her buckled into the passenger seat. She kept both hands wrapped around that one little bag, knuckles white on it, watching the building over her shoulder like it might come after her.

“Look at me.” I waited until she did. “You’re never going back there. Not next week. Not ever. You hear me?”

Her chin trembled. She pressed her lips flat against it and nodded.

“For now, you come back to school with me. You can stay at my place while I sort the rest of it out. Nobody gets to you there.” I pulled onto the road and put the building behind us for good. “After that, wherever you want. You tell me where, and that’s where we go. Where do you want to be?”

“Home.” No hesitation. The first sure thing she’d said. “Hatterwick. I want to see Gabi. I want to see Gwen.” Her voice climbed toward something almost alive. “I want my life back, Jace. I want my whole life back.”

Gwen.

The name shot into me like a fist under the ribs.

She didn’t know.

Two years locked in that place with her mail read—if she even got mail—her phone gone, and her whole world narrowed to whatever our parents chose to let through. Nobody had told her. She didn’t know Gwen Busby had vanished off the island the same night the water almost took her. She didn’t know about the search parties, or the dogs, or the empty grief the whole island still carried. She sat there with her sunken eyes lit up over a girl who’d been gone two years, saying her best friend’s name like she’d pick up the phone tomorrow.

My hands tightened on the wheel.

One thing at a time. I’d get food in her first. Something that wasn’t served on a tray. Real clothes, more than fit in that bag. I’d give her a day of feeling human before I took the earth out from under her a second time.

Somewhere between here and home, I’d find the words to break her world open again, without breaking her along with it.

One

Present Day

JACE

The town council meeting room held maybe fifty people on a good day.

Tonight every folding chair was filled before Chelsea Tate brought things to order with the gavel she seemed way too fond of, and the walls filled after that. I’d taken a spot on the left side, with a clear sightline to the main entrance and the council table.

Sawyer found me two minutes in and leaned beside me. “Bigger crowd than I expected.”

I looked out at the room. Mostly locals, happy to have their island back now that the tourist season had ended. A group of women from the historical society, in their good coats, tittering like a clutch of hens. Business owners of varying ages. Former classmates from high school, who’d stayed here to start families and build lives. A couple of faces I didn’t recognize had planted themselves near the front. Both had recorders out. Mainland press drawn by the story, no doubt.

And it was a story. Police chief executed by a sniper’s bullet. State Bureau of Investigation rolling in by Labor Day for a department audit. The discovery of twenty years of corruption by the man tasked with keeping this island safe.